Was the Gravitational Wave Background Finally Discovered?!?

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A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching for subtle connections between the signals from rapidly spinning cores of dead stars in our galactic neighborhood. In other words, the gravitational wave background has probably been detected using a pulsar timing array.

Thumbnail Image Illustration Credit: Olena Shmahalo for NANOGrav

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